Custom Rocking Horse
Custom Rocking Horse Full View
This is the custom rocking horse I designed for my 3 year old daughter. I was unsatisfied with all of the plans I found online and decided to go all out. To generate the plans I found the pictures of a galloping horse from some of the earliest pictures of a quarter horse galoping. I then used that picture to generate flat pannel cutouts and added some personal embellishments to the main and tail. For this horse I cheated a bit and used hardwood plywood laminations to make the body, then carved them with a King Arthur chainsaw bit for the angle grinder. After that it was a LOT of hand work with rhasps, files, and sandpaper. My daughter decided she liked the look of a paint or pinto horse and I used different colored stains to mottle the horse’s coat. After a couple coats of polyurethane I had a pretty durable toy that my daughter has had a blast rocking on since christmas.
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Custom Rocking Horse Full View
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Rocking Horse Head Closeup
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Rocking Horse Carving Mostly Done
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Plan in SolidWorks
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This is the original photo that was used to generate the initial shape and plans.
Comments
Beautiful work. Using the plywood is a great idea. How has the horse held up over the last year?
Hi !
what a piece of art !!!
You just give me the taste the made one.
Do you have plans or dimensions please ???
Thank you and keep your endless talent working !
André
I'll have to do some digging as I built the rocking horse in Solidworks a couple years ago. I don't really have any sort of complete instructions, just a set of 2D drawings that were scaled up to make templates. All of the carving was done free hand (read by the seat of my pants!). If you are interested in plans send me an email at: [email protected] and I'll see if I can find the 2D drawings I used. The horse can be scaled to whatever size you want, but this one had 4 ft long rockers and stands around 28 in tall at the saddle.
As for how the horse has held up, So far the only problem I've had have been with the rockers themselves. I made them from 2x8 stock... bad idea. I should have made them from plywood so they would have been stronger. The back parts of the rockers have both broken off with the grain and been repaired. They've held up to some serious abuse since then though. The actual horse part is doing great, and I'm glad I didn't end up adding the handles because now my girls are very good at balancing and holding on with their legs and arms when they rock!
Thanks for the compliments! This was my first project of this magnitude! Hopefully I get the chance to do more similar projects.
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